13 March 2011

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Albums and Singles

This is the first LP by this Northern California sound artist, but he has been active for almost a decade and is most closely associated with the scene around the excellent Root Strata label.  Students of Decay is another appropriate home for Davis though, as Ask the Dust (a rare John Fante reference!) offers up quite a bit of warm drone that also dabbles its toes a bit in stuttering electronic chaos, field recordings, and more formal composition.  Ultimately, it is a bit too chameleonic and intermittently pastoral to fully work for me as a complete work, but several of the individual pieces are quite wonderful.

Students of Decay

The album begins with its one of its finest and most ambitious pieces, the 12-minute "Superpartner," which languorously and beautifully drifts through moods and motifs like a constantly shifting dream.  While quite a bit of it could reasonably be described as "drone," Davis rarely dwells on one theme for very long and embellishes even the simplest parts with unusual textures and gently hallucinatory sounds.  Also, the whole thing feels "real" rather than heavily laptop-processed (despite its occasional synth-y flanging and its electronically blurting and blooping crescendo), as John uses a lot of clear metallic textures and skillfully employs field recordings to provide a fleeting and unstable sense of place.

Unfortunately, the album starts to lose momentum a bit with the shorter "Joy Meridian" which treads into fairly straightforward "laptop drone" territory, albeit with harsher buzzing than usual and some hazily fluttering notes in the upper registers.  The following "Palestrina" returns to quite similar territory, but does so much more successfully, as it combines a lushly warm bed with a vibrant host of skipping, stuttering, and swelling sounds that reminds me of some of Area C's better work.

The album's centerpiece, the 16-minute "Synecdoche," initially seems to derail the album yet again, as it opens with a bittersweet, but far too pleasant and straightforward piano performance. Thankfully, that segment abruptly ends with a lot of clattering and crashing and the piece begins in earnest around the 4-minute mark with a sustained swell of heavenly synth thrum gradually made faintly uneasy by an unstably throbbing low-end.  After a mercifully brief segue into rather generic drone, Davis deftly steers the piece into significantly more disturbed territory with murky, uncomfortably dissonant harmonies before ultimately giving way to a quivering and twinkling treated-guitar coda.  Curiously, Davis then follows what would have been a fine ending with a few minutes of machine noise followed by the return of the piano, though it is artfully blurred and smeared this time around.

The closing "Julian Wind" provides an especially surreal and curious conclusion to an already very surreal and curious album, as it sounds like someone sadly playing a melodica by the ocean, only there seems to also be a steel band distantly playing underwater...and then it all ends with a very creepy and unsettling snatch of film or interview dialogue.  That was a great way to end the album, as it sharply reminded how pleasantly disorienting the entire experience had been.

On balance, Ask the Dust is very good album, but not an unqualified success by any means.  Rather, its many flaws are cancelled out by its admirable ambitions and masterful execution.  John Davis definitely did not set out to make a standard-issue drone album and he proved himself to be very good at realizing almost everything he set out to do–a noble effort was certainly made.  The only catch is that none of John's great ideas are given much time to fully bloom, nor do any motifs ever recur to give Ask the Dust the feel of something larger than a collection of five songs, unless the overarching narrative Davis was going for was "change is constant."  On the bright side, that also means that none of Davis's weaker ideas stick around for long, but I spent the bulk of the album alternately thinking "this is great!" and "wait- why are you stopping!?!"

Samples:

• Superpartner
• Palestrina
• Synecdoche

 

 

13 March 2011

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Albums and Singles

This young singer-songwriter takes inspiration from Dinosaur Jr frontman J Mascis, among other folks, and will be opening his US tour this spring. In a refreshing twist, Vile has released the better album this year, outshining Mascis on his latest album (and most stripped-down to date).

Matador

Admittedly, perhaps part of the reason I find Kurt Vile's Smoke Ring for My Halo so much more vital and engaging than Mascis' Several Shades of Why (which I also covered this week) is that I am approaching Vile's work for the first time. This is his fourth collection of songs, but the first one I've given a close ear—oftentimes, I have found that sense of unfamiliar discovery can elevate music to a higher plane. Regardless, this is a strong album from Vile—ten spacious, endearing songs carved out of the American singer/songwriter tradition by a young man filled with talent, hopefully with a fruitful career yet ahead of him.

The songwriting on Smoke Ring for My Halo is more varied, and less overtly familiar, than on Mascis' album. Vile switches off between deft acoustic finger-picking ("Baby's Arms"), classic guitar rock ("Puppet to the Man") and stoned, sprawled-out jams ("Society Is My Friend") with ease, keeping me on my toes. The instrumentation on the majority of these songs is sparse, the production always intimate; each strum of Vile's guitar and slide of his fingers across the frets is captured like a firefly in a jar. Vile's lyrics sound casually tossed-off in an endearing way, never over-thought, and are complementary to his guitar playing, capturing the same sense of weary resignation that Mascis has perfected over the years.

Listened to side-by-side, Smoke Ring for My Halo is not worlds away from Several Shades of Why—like Mascis, Vile has a pleasant, smoky depth to his voice and an ability to convey his emotions through his distinctive guitar playing. The difference, then, is that Vile has made an album that feels like a spotlight on his creativity and talents, not a downplay of his strengths (as on Mascis' album). If allowed only one of these albums on my shelf, I would choose Smoke Ring for My Halo—it has proven itself a comfortable, low-key soundtrack as winter turns to spring.

Samples:

• Puppet to the Man
• Society Is My Friend
• Runner Ups

13 March 2011

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Albums and Singles

I have traditionally been a sucker for J Mascis—his songs with Dinosaur Jr capitalize on my favorite aspects of rock music, overflowing with hooks, distortion and blistering guitar solos. After two surprisingly excellent albums with the original Dinosaur Jr line-up, Mascis' first studio album under his own name asks listeners to take out their earplugs for a scaled-back, primarily acoustic effort.

Sub Pop

J Mascis' songwriting remains distinctively his own on Several Shades of Why, his first solo album recorded in a proper studio. On Martin + Me and Live at CBGB's, Mascis played it rather safe, revisiting Dinosaur Jr material in a solo acoustic setting and throwing in additional cover songs; here, Mascis turns in a set of ten brand new, original songs. He also forgoes Dinosaur Jr band mates Lou Barlow and Murph for a rotating cast of collaborators, among them Sophie Trudeau (A Silver Mt. Zion/Godspeed You! Black Emperor), Pall Jenkins (The Black Heart Procession), Matt Valentine, and Kurt Vile (whose excellent new album, Smoke Ring for My Halo, I also covered this week).

On first listen, Mascis' knack for writing immediately classic-sounding hooks is intact—this album is enjoyable, at least initially, because Mascis knows how to turn out a pleasant, familiar-sounding tune. As with any musician with a recognizable style, though, Mascis struggles walking a fine line: finding a new spin on his formula versus retreading his old habits. On Several Shades of Why, Mascis leans toward the latter, not diverging noticeably from his songwriting methods; rather, he scales back the instrumentation—dull, acoustic arrangements with dragging tempos and less memorable hooks than his recent Dinosaur Jr material. As a result, Several Shades of Why is a chore to listen to while it's playing and a forgettable listen once it's over.

I get the impression that had Mascis not switched off his effects pedals and cranked down the volume, these might as well be Dinosaur Jr songs. Unfortunately, there's no fuzzy distortion for the tunes to hide behind, and Mascis' guitar solos are spread thinly; when his guitar does strike on occasion (as on "Where Are You"), it feel less like a searing-hot cauldron of water than a familiar childhood blanket. Mascis is good at what he does, but he does not engage me in a stripped-down, acoustic setting that spotlights the predictability of his songwriting. Can we assemble Mascis' wall of Fender amps and crank up the distortion for another Dinosaur Jr album, please?

Samples:

• Not Enough
• Where Are You
• What Happened

13 March 2011

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Albums and Singles

Although a similar CD was released by Sub Rosa 20 years ago, this is not a reissue but a re-recording, an amendment to that 1990 release. Here, Jean-Luc Fafchamps revisits one of Morton Feldman's most popular pieces and casts a new light on it. The themes, which Feldman had developed throughout his life as a composer, are all consolidated into one perfect piece of music. He picks up the delicate beauty of the piece in a different way to his previous recording, a truer rendition of the score but by no means negating the original release.

 

Sub Rosa

Especially towards the end of his life, Feldman had a keen interest in rugs made by nomadic groups from around the world. Recently, I had the chance to view some of his collection as part of a larger exhibition on Feldman and his personal and creative relationship with modern art. The design of these rugs, much like the paintings he loved so much, informed his own composition techniques. Feldman is well known for his graphic notation in place of traditional music notation and the rugs also influenced the way he conveyed music on paper; the score of Flute and Orchestra is directly comparable to a 19th century prayer rug from Turkey.

However, there are other relationships between his music and these rugs and Triadic Memories highlights at least one of these relationships. In many of the rugs Feldman collected (or at least those on display at the Irish Museum of Modern Art), the repetitive patterns that made up the designs seemed to warp and stretch (a "crippled symmetry" in Feldman's own words). In the same way, Triadic Memories is built up around repetitions of notes which change over time. The second or third notes in a three-note motif begin to elongate in comparison to the first or second appearance of the motif much like the designs on the rugs showed distortions in comparison to each other.

Repetitions are not just the main hallmark of this piece but the reason for this new recording entirely. Fafchamps originally released a version of Triadic Memories on Sub Rosa in 1990 which was based on a 1987 publication of the score. In that particular edition, there were directions over the notes to be repeated but they did not specify how many times the notes were to be repeated in each case so Fafchamps repeated the measures once and moved on to the next one. He later learned that the different measures had different numbers of repetitions associated with them (clarified on a later publication of the score which he works from here) and felt the need to re-record the piece.

This is a wonderful thing as this current recording is a beautiful (if rather fast in comparison to some of the other recordings by other pianists) version of Triadic Memories. The subtle shifts in the length of the notes and their exact pitch (what sounds like a repetition of an earlier measure is actually a semitone higher later on) give the impression of patterns reflected on water, the ripples breaking up the image while retaining its character perfectly. With this stretching of the music, Feldman's piece plays with the sensation of time. This is typical of Feldman's approach throughout his career as he used pauses and silences like his contemporaries in the visual arts used blank canvas and monochrome spaces to fix the various elements of their painting in to a composition. The notes and chords of Triadic Memories are suspended in the air like the forms of one of Franz Kline's black and white paintings or indeed any of Mark Rothko's later works. In particular, the bleeding of Rothko's colors into each other is directly comparable to Feldman’s stretching of the notes. Fafchamps masterfully conveys these ideas through his playing; his fingers brushing the keys rather than pressing them.

As aforementioned, the presence of this "corrected" recording of Triadic Memories does not replace a "faulty" version (Fafchamps himself recognizes this in the liner notes). Instead, this is purely an alternative view of the piece much like the longer renditions also out there (such as Marilyn Nonken's which pushes the piece to over 90 minutes). Like most modern composers, Feldman allowed for variation in a way that contemporary interpretations of classical music have usually stifled. This stretching of the composition, let alone the notes, again comes back to the Oriental rugs and their own wear and tear from use.

samples:

• Triadic Memories

 

13 March 2011

Albums and Singles

Eternal Tapestry's album on Thrill Jockey is their first widely available recording, coming on the heels of a slew of limited-press LP and CD-r releases the last couple years. It's a charming, low-key improvisational rock record that I found a bit of a "comfort food" listen, playing exactly to my tastes. While it doesn't strike me as especially innovative or mind-blowing among its peers, I find it a satisfying album, easy to get lost in start-to-finish each time I put it on.

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13 March 2011

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Albums and Singles

Eternal Tapestry's album on Thrill Jockey is their first widely available recording, coming on the heels of a slew of limited-press LP and CD-r releases the last couple years. It's a charming, low-key improvisational rock record that I found a bit of a "comfort food" listen, playing exactly to my tastes. While it doesn't strike me as especially innovative or mind-blowing among its peers, I find it a satisfying album, easy to get lost in start-to-finish each time I put it on.

Thrill Jockey

Beyond the 4th Door is an album of patient, sprawling psychedelia. The songs flow seamlessly into one another and have a live-recorded feel to them, like a group of friends rented out an inexpensive studio for a couple hours, threw back a 12-pack of brews, strapped on their instruments and hit 'Record' for a night of casual, off-the-cuff playing. That's not to say the album is formless or uninteresting; the players involved have honed their skills with Jackie-O Motherfucker, Heavy Winged, Cloaks, and similar-minded bands, and their experience pays off in creating a cohesive listen without any moments that make me reach for the all-too-handy 'Skip' button.

The five songs on Beyond the 4th Door—to the extent that pieces of music without traditional verse-chorus structures and intelligible vocals are worth calling "songs"—are extended, improvised guitar workouts backed by a structured, evenly-paced rhythm section that lets the guitar interplay do most of the heavy lifting. The songs unfold and reveal their nuances in a way that reminds me of Popol Vuh, allowing instruments such as cymbals and horns to enter and leave the mix subtly, without disrupting the laid-back, cosmic tones that are always present.

"Galactic Derelict," at the album's midpoint, is when Eternal Tapestry trade the subtle, droning explorations of the first two songs for a fuller sound recalling Bardo Pond circa Lapsed—washes of heady, psychedelic distortion and feedback combined with dual, overlapping guitar lines. After "Galactic Derelict," the album reverts back to melodic, slightly bluesy guitar lines and relaxed tempos, permitting the album end in the same subtle way it began. Beyond the 4th Door is subtle, blissed-out psychedelia played with casual confidence.

Samples:

• Ancient Echoes
• Galactic Derelict
• Time Winds Through a Glass, Clearly

08 March 2011

Albums and Singles

I have always been a sucker for J Mascis—his songs with Dinosaur Jr overflow with hooks, distortion and blistering guitar solos. Mascis' first studio album under his own name, Several Shades of Why, is a primarily acoustic effort and, unfortunately, a forgettable listen. In a refreshing twist, Kurt Vile, who takes inspiration from Mascis and will be opening his US tour this spring, outshines him on his latest album (and most stripped-down to date), Smoke Ring for My Halo.

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06 March 2011

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Albums and Singles

This surreal and wildly ambitious project began quite humbly in 1988 when Greif found an old three-LP audio book of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland at a thrift store and began idly warping and enhancing it.  Sometime afterward, he submitted an unrelated cassette to Staalplaat with some of those experiments on the back side and they offered to release the Alice material instead of the intended work. Originally released only as a series of five limited-edition albums in the early '90s, this sprawling epic quickly became Greif's most well-known and enduring work.  Appropriately, it has now been reissued as a rather striking box set for the second time.

Soleilmoon

Randy Grief began making music in the 1970s, but he first came into relative prominence with the launch of his Swinging Axe Productions label in 1983, which released early works by Controlled Bleeding and Merzbow.  That early stint in America's very lonely noise cassette underground left a lasting impression on his aesthetic over the years, despite the fact that he soon began finding inspiration in literature, exotic field recordings, and musique concrète.  As a result, the stylistic stew here is a very eclectic one, blending radio serials, tape loop cut-ups, avant garde classical cacophony, clanking early industrial textures, horror movie soundtracks, and brooding ambient over the course of six mind-bending hours (and not especially seamlessly). Despite that clumsiness (and, of course, the technological limitations inherent in making computer-based music two decades ago), Alice in Wonderland is a spectacular achievement.

Greif faced a number of unusual hurdles with this project.  The first, naturally, is the sheer scope of the material: not many musicians have the imagination, attention-span, and patience necessary to make a coherent six-hour-long soundscape with very little reliance on repetition.  In fact, Randy himself has stated that the project probably never would have been finished if he hadn't committed to it in advance (the whole thing took him 5 years to finish).  The second difficulty is that Greif found the tone of the narration to be too even for his liking, so he needed to force some dynamism into it without sacrificing intelligibility, flow, and coherence.  The third (and most substantial) problem is that Carroll's story was already perfectly fine without some experimental musician from LA messing around with it.  Improving upon something that is already complete (and a literary classic besides) is no simple feat: Greif had to find a way to add music without detracting or distracting from the text while also avoiding the peril of being utterly eclipsed by it.  The route that Randy wisely chose was to texturally highlight and emphasize the darker side that was already there.

While it is very easy to pick out some rather dated textures, bombastic moments, or bloated individual pieces over the five CDs, the whole is often quite successful. Greif exercises a great deal of tact, largely allowing the narration to continue unmolested and seldom plunging into lengthy instrumental stretches.  That linearly unfolding thread prevents the album from ever losing much momentum or being derailed by much in the way of self-indulgence.  Also, that same stream of words provides much grist for Grief's accompaniment: most of the creative heavy lifting on the album involves the skillful and aggressive manipulation of the actors' voices, surrounding the narration with disjointed phonemes, pitch-shifting, panning, backwards voices, and sundry other neat tricks.  On the rare occasions when Randy does attack the actual narrative flow, he generally does it to supremely hallucinatory effect, making Alice and her friends sound submerged, fragmented, or narcotically slowed-down when it suits the story.

As for the music underneath it all, Greif is all over the place.  The shimmering and droning ambient passages still sound fairly contemporary today, but some of the harsher or more rhythmic pieces can be a bit jarring or too rooted in late '80s industrial/noise music for my liking: plodding drum machines with lots of reverb, very artificial-sounding synthesizers, etc.  However, it all perversely works somehow, as the resulting dissonance and disorientation serve the themes of the story quite well. Also, Greif definitely succeeded in giving the story a compelling dynamic arc, as his clanging rhythms and garish sound colors bring a great deal of animation and tension to the more action-packed parts of the tale, which in turn heightens the impact of the woozier, more drugged-sounding passages.

Before hearing this album, I had never thought that the story of Alice in Wonderland held much interest for me as an adult.  However, Greif has done a truly remarkable job in emphasizing its more unsettling, creepy, and Kafkaesque elements in a thoroughly compelling and imaginative way.  Despite its occasional missteps and some ravaging from time, the cumulative power of this album is massive.  In fact, it is difficult to imagine experiencing Alice in installments over the course of several years as its original listeners did–a boxed set is the only logical format for this release.  Or course, six solid of hours of mechanized psychedelia is certainly exhausting, but so is spending a week in a foreign county: total immersion seems like the only way to fully experience a work this singular and consuming Many people have called this album a classic over the years and I don't disagree, but this is something more than a great album: this is a complete, self-enclosed sound world.

Samples:

• The Rabbit Hole
• A Pool of Tears
• The Dream of Wonderland

 

 

06 March 2011

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Albums and Singles

As much as I enjoyed Pedestrian Deposit's first "post-noise" effort (2009's Austere), I didn't think it was nearly on the same level as what Jon Borges and Shannon Kennedy were capable of delivering live.  That disparity has now been conclusively remedied, as this expanded reissue of a 2010 Housecraft cassette captures the duo at their mesmerizing, crackling, and eerie peak.

Monorail Trespassing

Pedestrian Deposit's evolution since Kennedy's arrival has been quite a rapid and dramatic one, which is no surprise: adding a second person to a former one-man operation is bound to have a big impact.  Particularly if that one man is best-known as a harsh noise artist and the new member is a cellist.  Remarkably, however, there did not seem to be any period of awkwardness or growing pain, as Austere debuted the more restrained Pedestrian Deposit sound beautifully.

Still, it was already a snapshot of very different band by the time it was released, as Jon and Shannon's progression has been much faster than their recorded work can keep up with.  It is hard to articulate exactly what has changed since the recording of that album and these four songs (recorded between 2009 and 2010), but it seems like PD have grown a bit more adept at exploiting the full potential of Shannon's cello work.  For instance, there is actually a melancholy plucked melody at the beginning of "A Blessing."  Such excursions are the exception rather than the rule though: East Fork/North Fork is still very much a hazy, drone-centric, and forlorn-sounding album. Nevertheless, a bit more warmth and color have definitely crept into the picture this time around.  Not much, of course, but enough to imbue the music with a little more character and humanity than I expected.  It makes a big difference, as the fleeting glimpses of life make the surrounding haunted, creaking emptiness seem significantly more affecting and unsettling.

Of course, a lot of the album's success is also due to the fact that Borges keeps getting better and more assured with each passing year.  While there is one welcome and well-timed blast of stuttering static in "Strife/Meridian" that reminds me of Pedestrian Deposit's more violent past, Jon has made the transition from explosive noise artist to architect of slow-burning ominousness seem effortless.  Throughout these four pieces, slow-moving bowed tones actively quiver, swell, and dissipate amidst often little more than a bed of hiss or low-hum.  This is a lot of open space here, which makes the cello sound especially lonely and endangered.  Also, I was especially struck by the attention to textural detail throughout the album, such as the low rhythmic swells, hums, crunches, and scrapes that call to mind distant machinery.  There is a definite sense of place, even if it is a rather foreboding one.  That dark atmosphere is further deepened by the fact that these pieces are not at all prone to repetition or stasis–they gradually unfold, which means that something always seems to be on the verge of happening.  

East Fork/North Fork makes me feel like I am alone in the ruins of a deserted town…or perhaps not alone (in a bad way).  It is never quite clear whether the pervading mood is desolation or quiet dread, which is the kind of tense ambiguity I like.  This might be the best album that Jon Borges has released yet.

Samples:

• A Blessing
• Strife/Meridian
• Cycle of Combustion

 

06 March 2011

Administrator

Albums and Singles

This is probably one of the most nauseating, disgusting sounding recordings I own, which isn't a surprise given the artists involved. It has a sound that drips with blood, saliva and phlegm and is more than a visceral experience from both of these two modern aktionists.

Blossoming Noise/Sharkbite Tapes

Consisting of live recordings from 2005 (a single performance from Phillips, three separate ones by Yeldham), both sides of this LP are immaculately presented sonically, with the sparse artwork and virgin white vinyl belying the disgusting mess hidden within the grooves.

Australia's favorite son and dualpLOVER head Justice Yeldham contributes three different shorter performances combined into a single side-long track called "Keep Daddy Safe" that captures sonically what his instrument looks like visually.His instrument is a contact mic’d piece of glass that he covers in KY Jelly and rubs his face on, violently, and blood often ends up an additional part of the mix.

The wet, sloppy undulating noise that comes forth is drenched in overdrive and metallic echoes, occasionally blasting out into almost synth-like textures.The second performance has a more cavernous, hollow sound with flatulent, guttural noises and spacey, sonorous outputs of tone, all thrown together in a sloppy mess.The combination of liquid gushes and distorted buzzes sounds like someone pissing on the third rail, before the performance obviously ends with glass shattering and applause.

Phillips, who is part of the Schimpfluch-Gruppe collective that also includes Rudolf Eb.er (Runzelstirn & Gurgelstock) and Joke Lanz (Sudden Infant), has his own brand of absurdist influenced performance art that is the clear descendant of the Viennese Aktionists, with the "Breaking Tests" of Gunter Brus seemingly as a starting point.

Phillips' performance, "Freedom Isn't Free" begins simple enough, with deep, carefully measured breathing that is barely louder than the crowd noise, paired with a slow electric pulse.Eventually the sound of his heartbeat becomes louder and faster, with the breathing transitioning into hyperventilation.

Any semblance of "normal" behavior is tossed out when his vocalisms twist into dog-like freakouts, choking, gagging, and pained screams, all of which are layered and looped together.Eventually the pieces come together into a heavy wall of noise, layers of squelches and occasional breaks to tense, unpleasant ambience punctuated by labored breathing that comes to a sudden, abrupt end that could almost have been Phillips losing consciousness, given the physical intensity of his performance.

There is this overall feeling of viscera and filth all over the album that makes it undeniably unpleasant, but like a messy car accident, it just makes it all the more attractive.This is two great sides of noise, but not anything pleasant to hear after a big meal.

samples:

• Justice Yeldham - "Keep Daddy Safe" (Excerpt 1)
• Justice Yeldham - "Keep Daddy Safe" (Excerpt 2)
• Dave Phillips - "Freedom Isn't Free"